NC Cultural Resources Newsroom

NEW BERN– J. Thomas Savage, director of museum affairs for Winterthur Museum and Country Estate will deliver the opening lecture, “Y’all Are Not From Around Here, Are you? Expatriate Charleston Objects,” at Tryon Palace’s 40th annual decorative arts symposium, which will be held on March 28-30 in New Bern.  In his presentation, Savage will discuss some of the factors which sent Charleston treasures to some far-flung and unlikely places—the “ones that got away” and “a few that returned.”

The theme of this year’s symposium, “Borrowed, Invented & Stolen: Celebrating the Decorative Arts in America,” offers a look at the links from continent to continent, region to region, and maker to maker as scholars looked closely at the decorative arts from the seventeenth through the nineteenth century to explore traces of the exotic, reverberations of the classics, and footprints of empire in the material world.

An outstanding group of speakers will be on hand to discuss how their individual expertise touches on this year’s theme.

• Suzanne Findlen Hood, assistant curator of ceramics and glass for at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, shares new findings on the importance of stoneware in the lives of 18th-century Americans and the development of an American stoneware industry and aesthetic.
• Beth Carver Wees, curator of American Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, examines the connections between Britain and British North America in the silver trade.
• Peter M. Kenny, Ruth Bigelow Wriston curator of American Decorative Arts and administrator of the American Wing, Metropolitan Museum of Art, will address how New York merchants cabinetmakers influenced the spread of classicism to the early 19th-century American South.
• Christopher Lane, co-owner of the Philadelphia Print Shop, will speak on European influences on American prints.
• In her presentation on Oriental Carpets in 17th and 18th-century America, Sarah B. Sherrill, editor of “Studies in the Decorative Arts,” at The Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design, and Culture in New York City, connects the Old and New Worlds with the exotic East.
• Patrick Lee Lucas, assistant professor, Department of Interior Architecture, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, will assess the continuing influence of these themes on American Decorative Arts.   

For registration information, go to www.tryonpalace.org or call (252) 514-4900 or (800) 767-1560.

Administered by the Division of State Historic Sites, Tryon Palace Historic Sites & Gardens is part of the N.C. Department of Cultural Resources, a state agency dedicated to the promotion and protection of North Carolina’s arts, history, and culture.  The Cultural Resources theme for 2008 is “Telling Our Stories.”  For more information, visit www.ncculture.com/.